IT TAKES balls of steel to go against popular opinion and turn down a $US3 billion dollar offer to buy your company, especially when the competitor offering the deal is threatening to otherwise crush you.

But in 2013 that’s exactly what a 23-year-old Evan Spiegel did.

The decision by Mr Spiegel and his partner Bobby Murphy — who co-founded disappearing messaging platform Snapchat — shocked both Wall Street and Silicon Valley and was derided by countless commentators.

Mr Murphy and Mr Spiegel, who were both only years out from studying at Stanford University, stood to make $US750 million each in the deal. But they didn’t bite.

Adding to their seemingly inexplicable hubris was the fact that Snapchat didn’t make any money. Not a cent.

“Snapchat, it behooves me to point out, makes no money. I don’t mean that it is spending more money than it takes in, like Twitter. It literally does not have any revenue,” wrote one tech writer who mocked the decision to turn down the offer at the time.

“Someone tell me even a halfway plausible way Snapchat can make any money,” tweeted another.

In his first attempt to buy the app back in 2012, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had tried to staunch a young Mr Spiegel telling him that Facebook planned to release a nearly identical app a few days later. That app turned out to Facebook Poke, and proved to be a massive flop.

For his part, the (sometimes controversial) Snapchat CEO had his sights set on the long term.

The parent company of the Snapchat social network (simply known as Snap) is valuing itself between $18.5 and $22 billion ($A24-28 billion) as it prepares for the tech industry’s biggest initial public offering in years.

Facebook raised $US16 billion when it went public in 2012.

Snap Inc. said in a regulatory filing Thursday that the IPO is likely to be priced between $14 and $16 per share.

There is some uncertainty over how investors will respond, but if the company pulls it off Mr Spiegel will net a $US588 million ($764 million) payday on top of his stake in the company which could be worth more than $US3.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In a move that has become increasingly common in Silicon Valley, the structure of the shares will mean Mr Spiegel and Mr Murphy will retain an iron-like grip over the company and the direction it takes — a move that has served to unsettle investors on Wall Street.

The young founders will have controlling power over all matters at the company through a special class of stock that gives them 10 votes for every share they own. The Class A stock being sold in the IPO has no voting power, while another class has one vote per share.

There has also been concern over slowing growth in users on the platform which has spooked some investors.

“Snap is already demonstrating decelerating growth before they have managed to break even,” one analyst told Reuters this week.

Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel attend the TIME 100 Gala, TIME's 100 most influential people in the world back in 2014. Picture: Jemal CountessSource:Supplied

In Michael Lewis’ book The New New Thing about Silicon Valley icon Jim Clark (the man behind the first internet web browser, Netscape), he wrote that Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies tend to be those that “exist in a state of pure possibility”.

So far, that has been one of Snap’s biggest strengths. And, like Facebook, the company has adapted nimbly over to users’ whims and demands which has proven fundamental to outlasting social media fads.

For example, it’s added a “Discover” section where a diverse group of publishers — including news.com.au, People, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Vice — post video-heavy stories aimed mostly at millennials.

Another feature, “Stories,” lets people create a narrative from messages, videos and photos from the past 24 hours. It’s so popular that Facebook’s Instagram now has a version of it, too.

Snapchat’s “Lenses,” lets people add animated overlays to photos and videos and have proved distinctly popular among users.

According to the latest figures, Snapchat has 600 million users worldwide as of late 2016 and 158 million daily active users.